64 OPINION
Over The Top
Words by Neal Romanek THE CAPTAINS OF CAPTOLOGY
The content industry is developing increasingly powerful tech for data collection and audience retention. How can these tools best help viewers?
become something of a superstar reformer, addressing CEOs and governments, non- profits and universities on the limitations – and dangers – of our connected world. Harris TED message is a cool-headed exploration of how the desperate competition for viewer eyeballs, supercharged by a cocktail of advertising and ever more encompassing user data, is disempowering us as individuals, as communities and as democracies. He adds that this “hijacking” of human attention is made all the more powerful by highly addictive persuasive design technologies. And Harris knows whereof he speaks. He was appointed Google’s first design ethicist, as a result of a widely circulated email of his which brought into question the company’s societal impact. But before then, he attended Stanford’s Persuasive Tech Lab (http://captology. stanford.edu), where he learned from the masters how to use technology to change hearts and minds – a craft called ‘captology’. Persuasive design has been a part of human culture since the Ancient Greeks employed the techniques of rhetoric to smash home a point. The difference now
is that virtually every citizen carries in their pocket – and spends much of their day facing – some device which employs invisible algorithms and AI’s who’s job it is to keep a user engaged. Lest we shrug off the potential for AI’s to outwit and manipulate us, remember that it’s already been two years since Google’s AlphaGo AI defeated Lee Sedol, the world’s greatest Go player. Go is recognised as the world’s most complicated strategy game. If an AI can out perform the world’s greatest Go player, how much easier is it to outwit me in my attempts to be the master of my own content browsing? There is a common notion that media consumers have more choice than they’ve ever had. But ask any user of YouTube, Netflix, Facebook if they feel like they are in control and more often than not you’ll get back half- chortled replies about being “totally addicted”. Netflix CEO Reed Hasting said in a talk at last year’s Summit LA, that his company’s biggest competitor isn’t Amazon or HBO. It’s the “broad range of things you (do) to relax and unwind, hang out and connect – and we compete with all of that”. He went on to
year ago, Tristan Harris gave a TED Talk which has logged over 2 million views. As TED Talks go, that’s not a huge score – nothing
close to ‘10 things you didn’t know about orgasm’, which has, rightfully, garnered ten times as many views. But unlike most TED Talks, Harris’s address garnered a standing ovation – and an atypical post-talk Q&A. His address was called ‘How a handful of tech companies control billions of minds every day’. An article in The Atlantic magazine called Harris the “closest thing Silicon Valley has to a conscience”. In a time of increasing distrust of the tech giants that form the foundations of so much of our lives, he has
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